David Foster Wallace is very smart and clever, and he's very fond of making sure you, the reader, never forget it. Although his "look at how well I use the English language" approach works well for me in the context of a novel (such as the fantastic Infinite Jest), it doesn't quite hold together in the context of a book on mathematical history.

I'm not afraid of math. I have advanced degrees in electical engineering and computer science, and my mother is fond of recalling the time when I insisted to my first-grade teacher that you could subtract a larger number from a smaller number if you allowed for negative numbers. And the time I excoriated my high-school geometry teacher for giving our class a nonsensical problem that was based on a "swingset" in a plane. So, it's not fear of mathematics that made this book unappealing.

I think the problem here is a mismatch of form and content. Wallace is clearly educated well-enough to truly understand transfinite math, and he's sufficiently skilled as an historian to put the details in order, but somehow the presentation, in an incredibly dense 300 pages, doesn't quite work. The footnotes too often have a tinge of condescension, and the build-up of concepts is too slow in some places; too fast in others.

As a result, I struggled to maintain momentum as I read. It didn't help that I had to look up a word in the dictionary every few pages (the A-Lex software on my PDA was a huge time-saver there). In the end, I understand infinity a little bit better, and I expanded my vocabulary infinitesimally (that's a lame joke, I know). However, I don't know anyone to whom I could in good faith recommend this book.